Canadian Officials Arrest Woman Carrying 10,000 Diamonds

The woman, Helena Freida Bodner, aged 66, has been charged with four customs offences and two counts under Canada's Export and Import of Rough Diamonds Act.

Canadian customs officials arrested a woman at Toronto’s International Airport who allegedly hid more than 10,000 diamonds inside her body.

The woman, who landed in the city from Trinidad and Tobago, was reportedly carrying 10,202 rough diamonds with a weight of 1,500 carats and an estimated value of $400,000, the Globe and Mail newspaper reported.
 
“At $266 a carat, those are stones of very good quality,” said Dorothée Gizenga, executive director of the Ottawa-based Diamond Development Initiative, a non-governmental organization.

“Considering the distance over which the person had to carry such a quantity of diamonds in the belly, from Trinidad to Canada, it is possible that the diamonds were ingested in Trinidad.”

The nearest source of diamonds to Trinidad and Tobago are Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana.

Venezuela left the Kimberley Process voluntarily five years ago. NGO Global Witness claims that millions of dollars of diamonds are smuggled out of Venezuela to neighboring Brazil and Guyana to be passed off as legitimate Kimberley Process approved diamonds and then enter the diamond pipeline.